Fear of the Unknown II - Standing up to Fear

     I was going to write my second "Fear of the Unknown" post about some heady thoughts I've been contemplating around the role of imagination in fear and how culturing it through TV alienates us from the wild outdoors...
... when I had a dream last night.
           The dream woke me up,
                because it came to the ultimate ending.

     Even as I write this, my mind is dodging it, asking why I need to write it. And the answer is that I need to face my own fear. Out loud. With courage and honesty. As Thoreau said, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

The dream was simple:
     The people of the earth -- us -- passed the no-turning-back deadline to prevent catastrophic global warming.
     And so the melting of the polar ice caps accelerated.
     And I climbed to the top of the highest of the hills with my family
     as the waters rose,
     and we held hands and sang,
     until there was no more.

      I have no thoughts about this now.  Only that I am still an optimist, and I believe in the earth's beauty as the eyes into God's soul. But I'm standing up, with my fear naked beside me, and I don't know what will happen.
      Stand with me. Let's face our fears and not deny. And in that naked place, let the soft and gentle morning light begin to warm us. Then let's get to work.



  

Fear of the Unknown I - Naming Fear

     Every now and then I am reminded that I am a mammal.
     One evening last summer, when the dark was finally claiming the land after a long twilight, Bob and I stepped outside as we usually do about then, the dogs on their leashes, for a last walk down our quiet road before bed.
     What we heard froze us in our tracks. My heart-rate jumped up, and I stared into the darkness in the direction of the unknown danger. A harsh shrieking sliced through the night from the woods that border the field. Poised on the edge of fight or flight, my mind scanned for what it could possibly be.

     Predator?... fox, coyote, lunatic with an axe? Something sick: a rabid raccoon that might come staggering out with spirals in its eyes and foam dripping from its fangs? The Wendigo? 

     Fear of the unknown is paralyzing, as it should be – briefly. That moment is the moment of assessment. The whole body is involved, adrenaline triggering heightened receptivity in the sensory organs and preparing our muscles for action. What we know as stress is a prolonged state of this fear of the unknown: can I meet my work deadlines? will traffic get in my way? is there enough money? what havoc will climate change bring to my family's future?
   Constant stress is not healthy. We can't live in paralysis, in fight, or in flight. We need to name the danger, identify our fear, make a decision and move through it. When the deer in our field see two humans and two dogs coming, they freeze, then either turn tail and bound off, or decide we are no threat for the moment and resume eating.

      Naming our fear is the first step. Relief begins to come when the unknown becomes known.

      Bob figured it out: that harsh shrieking that we have heard almost every night now since last summer is a juvenile Great Horned Owl begging for food. We don't really understand why the begging has gone on so long, or when the owl will grow up, but no longer does it inspire fear. In fact, we've become kind of fond of him, poor little shrieking fellow. We even named him Oscar.

Celebrating Wishgiving

     The table was set, new candles waited in the brass candlesticks, and outside the turkey was turning on a spit over the grill's charcoal-and-applewood coals. In the living room, three people sat huddled over pieces of paper, sometimes emitting a sigh of angst, sometimes crumpling a piece of paper and starting over.  Thanksgiving preparations were coming to a close, and it was nearly time to gather around the table.
    "I don't know what to wish!" complained one of my children. 
     Exactly. 
     This year, we asked everyone coming to the Thanksgiving table to bring one simple wish, written on a piece of paper, for every other person at the table. Usually we go around the table and say something we're thankful for. It's a good thing to do. But I also think it's a first step. You are standing in your own shoes examining the blessings that affect your life. Even if you're grateful that someone who was very, very sick has recovered -- it's still your own gratitude that is responding.
     To make a wish for someone else means you have to take the next step: to think about her, you need to get out of your shoes and try standing in hers for a minute. What does she need or want? What is he up to in his life? What is important? It's not a pop quiz; we told everyone a week ahead that we would be doing this. Even the out-of-town guests had a couple of days to discover a thing or two about the others who would be at the Thanksgiving table. So why the angst in the living room?
     Many of us are not in the habit of actively listening to each other. In our family, a lot of our conversations are about what happened that day, or what needs to happen. To be wish-givers, we have to exercise new muscles by asking more curiosity questions and listening between the lines. We have to be givers instead of receivers. And do this across generations.
     So there we were, eight people, each with a motley pile of paper next to our plate of heaping food. We ate and laughed and talked and listened, and when we finally slowed down, surreptitious nervous glances at the little piles signaled it was time to start.
     My brother-in-law volunteered to be first.  He read a wish for Anna, and gave it to her. That was easy. Then she picked up one of her wishes, and read it to her grandmother, who loved it. Gammy then read one to my sister, who then read one to me, and then I read one to Andrew... each followed by handing the paper wish across the table to that person. There were murmurs of surprise and appreciation, empathy and love. 

By the end, we all had a new motley pile of paper next to our plates, but in each pile were seven distinct wishes conceived, expressed and given personally to us. It was a wealth of wishes. And we were a family woven a little tighter, connected by the intimacy of wishing specific goodness for each other, out loud, in the presence of all at the table. 

     I think this is more than a new Thanksgiving tradition. Wishgiving can happen any time: at a Sunday night dinner, when a book group wraps up, on Christmas or New Year's Day, when a child is about to depart for college. As someone at our table said while looking through her pile of wishes: "I really felt heard." That's something to be thankful for.
 

Seeing through her eyes

     The letter from camp was two full hand-written pages (including a mini-route map she'd drawn) about their 42 day, 1100 mile canoe trip to Hudson Bay. Nina talked about bone-chilling cold and rain and the sunny see-forever days; the moose, bears, eagles... and clouds of mosquitoes; she described running big rapids, portaging canoes over boulders and through mud, and playing softball in the native Ojibway communities where they made friends. They fished, sang Grateful Dead songs, and slept hard every night. Bob and I drank in her stories with the thirst born of her long absence.
     Then came this paragraph:

     "Lastly, thank you for sending me here. I'm so incredibly lucky to see what I see and to do what I do. I wish you could see my views sometimes, and feel what I feel. It is an experience like no other, and I know that for my entire life I will value what my years at Wabun have given me."
     I sucked in my breath.
     "I wish you could see my views sometimes, and feel what I feel..."

*               *               *               *               *               *

     The girl that came home was strong and radiant. Nina had everything she needed to move confidently ahead with her life. And this fall, that would be dominated by changing schools as a high school junior.

      Like a canoe at the top of a set of rapids, she was lined up perfectly to shoot the Vs: pre-season soccer was the first chute she would enter, followed by four days camping with a small group in the school's “Outdoor Experience” program, and then finally the first academic day and the first soccer game. It started off well. She made the varsity team, came home talking about the girls she was meeting, and was eager to use her camping skills among new classmates.
      It was when she came back from visiting a friend over Labor Day weekend that it all blew up.
      “Mom, I had searing headaches on the drive. They were so bad I almost had to stop.”
      In hindsight, her concussion likely came from several impacts the preceding week during soccer: a header, a ball kicked at short range into her head, maybe others. Bob and I were blindsided; Nina hadn't even seen it herself.
     Concussion is not a measurable thing. No thermometer or x-ray or even color of mucus can report its status. No cough or limp betrays the inner illness. Even self-perception is unreliable, since it's asking the injured brain to assess itself.
      And then in Nina's case, add the unacceptable barrier a concussion would be for her smooth entry into a new school. It became nearly impossible for any of us to perceive her level of injury.
      While Nina's new friends were on the soccer field jelling as a team and her Outdoor Experience group was kayaking on Casco Bay, I sat by her bed and read to her from the book she needed to finish for summer reading. She was determined to heal, and her drive to get better worked – until after returning to school we realized that she couldn't remember what classes she'd gone to, and couldn't complete her homework.
      I felt like I was trying to see inside her head. What was her pain level? Was she dizzy at all? Did the light bother her? Was she just adjusting to low levels of these symptoms, or was she hiding them from us? I was also trying to see her world through her eyes. Did she have any friends to eat lunch with? Was she getting too far behind in Physics? And especially I tried to see the future: was there any way to return to soccer without a risk to her head? 
      Ultimately I just had to see it all clearly through my own eyes, and be honest about my filters of both empathy and fear that battled for the upper hand.
      Bob, the best partner in the world, was doing the same thing. Together we chose a path through the concussive fog. No more soccer. Go to bed early even if your homework isn't finished. After school come home and rest. Stay home if you're tired.

      Six weeks later, after she had been declared “healed”, Nina wrote about her concussion in an essay called “Hard Headed” for English class. Like her letter from Wabun, she shared with us her view of it all through her eyes. In it she wrote:
      "I was indeed healed, but I was vulnerable — too vulnerable. To my parents and the doctor, playing soccer for the rest of the season would not be worth the risk of missing a junior year of high school. Crushed, my narrow mindedness had lead me to blindly believe that my fragile cranium was ready to take on anything, yet in an attempt to convince myself that I was better, I had only made the truth more devastating.
      "As school progressed, I found the ambiguity and uncertainty of my present situation nearly as frustrating as the concussion itself. My role on the team had changed for good, and I was faced with the choice of determining how I could approach the school individually, team-less. To suffer or discover? I asked myself frequently. Refusing the former, I took an internal deep breath and began searching for ways to compromise my setback."

     And now, through my eyes:
      Nina, you are still the girl who has seen deep beauty, and you have a strength derived from overcoming challenges in the wilderness. That is in you. Your ability to look back on the wilderness of your concussion and see it honestly comes from that same core. It takes courage to see what is, instead of what you want to see. There will be other rivers, other rapids, and other wildernesses ahead. You'll make it through, like you made it to Hudson Bay. See the rapids you are in with clarity for what they are, and hold on to who you are, the girl of the northern rivers, the one who chooses to discover, instead of suffer.

The Democracy of Pie - postscript a year later

     Last October, I posted a recipe for really easy pie crust. While getting the post's URL to send to a friend who wants the recipe, I re-read it. In the last paragraph, amid a plea to eat home-cooked family dinners together (and not be afraid of pie crusts), I suggest "In fact, let's teach our sons to make – and share – pie."

     This is the pie Andrew made last night, his first using his grandmother's recipe. Apparently he volunteered to make and bring a pie for his advisory's Thanksgiving lunch on Tuesday. I love this coincidence, and especially love that he's making pies now!
     Happy Thanksgiving! May it be filled with sweet and savory pies.
    

The View from the Top

     Here within the 43rd parallel, summer pauses right about now.
     It's like being at the top of a Ferris wheel, Bob says.  

     Ever since the first birds arrived this spring, the garden sprouted seedlings, and lacrosse playoff games were played and finished, the wheel began turning with the glorious cycles of the onset of summer.  Then the children left for camp, the spinach bolted, and the Fourth of July washed out as Hurricane Arthur passed by.  Nonetheless, strawberries are now made into jam, monarch butterflies have returned (yes! I've seen them!), and the mailman brings letters from camp.  Up and down, ever in motion, summer spins along to this peak, and then, it pauses.

     Here at the top, the view is breath-taking.  I can see lush hayfields green with the second growth of grass.  The undulating horizon of forest canopy is now the darker, mature green of summer.  In the gardens, the yellows of spring have passed, replaced by the hot-month colors of crimson roses, orange day lilies and scarlet bee-balm. The Eastern Wood Peewee sings it's name from the forest edge with the sing-song of  summer's laziness.
     This is a sweet moment.  It's a time to just be.  Smell the earth after a thunderstorm.  Eat lettuce from a garden and taste the tenderness of home.  Listen: the spring birdsong is quieting, but the late summer insects are not yet scraping their "ch-ch" out of the fields, so listen in this pause.  Feel the length of the days while we have them.  Take in the view.

     The wheel will start to turn again soon enough.  Don't miss this moment. 

Parallel journeys

     And just like that they're gone.

     The alarm at 4:30 signaled the beginning of the thirty minute flurry: I, in my pajamas, in the kitchen making cinnamon toast and cutting up melon; they, in their bedrooms, putting on sweatshirts, hiking shoes and passport wallets; Bob, in the driveway, stowing duffels in the van, the porchlight waning as the skies lighten.  The dogs, excited and nervous at this unusual activity, wag their tails and stand hopefully by their bowls.

     The other travelers arrive, the bags are stowed, Anna and Andrew kiss me goodbye (twice!) – and they're gone. For them, this is the first leg of their glorious summer trip. They will drive to Boston, fly to Toronto, bus to Temagami, barge to Garden Island, and tonight eat dinner in the rustic great hall of Camp Wabun, built in the 1930s, with some of their best friends who they haven't seen for eleven months.

      Within three days, Anna will begin a 42-day canoe trip on the other side of the Arctic Divide, where the rivers flow north to Hudson Bay. This is the trip of a lifetime for her: at sixteen, she will paddle lakes and whitewater, portage around waterfalls, see eagles, moose, possibly wolves and bear, and finish at a First Nation village on the shores of the Bay. This is her ultimate trip as a camper, and she and her section will return to Wabun in August on paddle-in day with the confidence and quiet authority of Those Who Have Been Tested. The younger campers and parents alike will watch them with some measure of awe.

      I'm left here with the dogs and their dog bowls, empty juice glasses and plates with traces of cinnamon sugar by the sink, and the silence. Bob will be back later this morning, and our own six-week odyssey of temporary empty-nesting will begin.

      Right now, though, my heart is split, half here in the quiet, half in the van amidst the noisy excitement. We will not hear from them but once – possibly twice from Andrew – as there are no post offices or cell phone towers where they are going. This is good, for them and for us, even though it is at times hard. But as they discover who they are and what they are made of, I remember who I am and what I am made of.  I am also on a journey this summer.  And it starts now.